Category Archives: openMRS

Capstone Project: Week 2 Reflections

Another week, here and gone. Man time flies by when you’re having fun!

This past week the group and I made our first approach to google’s javascript framework, Angular 2. We dove right in with TypeScript and Angular2 by following the Tour of Heroes tutorial. This was pretty awesome but also very overwhelming. I found that it was quite a bit of information to digest in such a small amount of time. I, just as many others, learn best by solving problems of my own so I actually tried to tweak the tour of heroes a little bit here and there to learn a little bit more. As we dive head-long into the AMPATH project I am sure there will be times where I am completely overwhelmed, due to having to learn this brand new framework but something about that really gets me giddy like a child! I enjoy stretching my knowledge base and this is a for-sure way to do that.

In retrospect, one tutorial felt too short and I felt I didn’t learn enough. Myself and others in my group have decided to append our sprint, mid sprint to extend our Angular 2 learning. I have started reading the advanced guide to Routing on the Angular website to try and glean a little better understanding in this complex topic.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom by CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Reflections Week 1

For the first week of the Software Development Capstone we mostly focused on setting up teams that we will be working with for the rest of the semester. This was done by having one person voted in as a Team Recruiter and them being able to pick who was going to be with them. After everyone had a team of six, joined our class on Slack and then created a channel for our own team. Luckily, I have had experience with slack before and know how to use it so I didn’t have to do much reading about it.

We then moved onto learning about OpenMRS and AMPATH which is the specific project we will be working with. OpenMRS is a client-server application that allows people, with no previous programming knowledge, to build a medical records system. This is so that these systems can be easily built in developing countries. AMPATH is one of these medical record systems that is based out of Kenya and helps with numerous medical needs from disease to abuse.

On the software development side of things, OpenMRS uses three languages for their application. For the OpenMRS Platform they mainly use Spring MVC and Java EE, and for their ORM they use Hibernate. With most of their front end stuff they use Angular 2. For our group project, we were told that we’d mostly be working with Angular 2 so I started reading up on some basics about it and just going through simple tutorials. (For right now I’m just reading through this tutorial, but I noticed more on other blogs and hope to get to them this weekend.) I’ve done some small things with Javascript so I’m looking forward to learning how to work with Angular 2 in this up coming project!

If anyone else is interested in learning about OpenMRS or AMPATH, here are links to their sites:
OpenMRS Main Site
AMPATH Main Site
OpenMRS Developer’s Guide

From the blog CS WSU – Techni-Cat by clamberthutchinson and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Capstone Project: Week 1 Reflections

This was the first week we began working on the Capstone project class. This week we didn’t do too much in the line of actual development so I don’t have too much to talk about. However, we did form the teams that we’d be working with for the entire semester. Myself and a group of my friends were lucky enough to all be paired together. We’ve done some group projects before and know each other’s work ethic and what we need to do to push each other. I really enjoy working with these teammates as well, so that helps immensely when you’re about to spend the next 3 months with them working on a project.

We are going to be working in the Ampath project that is part of the OpenMRS group project. I have looked into the OpenMRS project prior to this class but never took the dive to begin developing for them. I am incredibly excited to have an opportunity to work with a code base as large as this one. This will be the first time I really dive into a project that I haven’t worked on or seen previously and will be working with someone else’s code quite a bit and that will be a new experience as well. The project we will be working in using Angular2 which is a javascript framework that I have done small personal projects in but haven’t done anything to this scale so I am incredibly excited to be getting this experience as well.

As a side note apart from school, I have been brushing up on my Angular2 skills by following this scotch.io tutorial as well as learning Ruby during some of my extra free time. I am enjoying Ruby as a language however, I find developing in PHP to be my comfort zone and ruby syntactically is a bit different. I find myself forgetting to close if statements with end as well as my loops. I am sure this is something I will get used to but it will take time!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom by CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 1

During the first week of this software development course, we took the time to form teams that will work well together. Most of the class time was used to get comfortable in our teams and prepare to work on our AMPATH and openMRS projects. We are using slack to communicate with our groups as well as the rest of the class. Although I have never used slack in the past, I find it very useful and it is an efficient way to stay connected and share information.

During this week i have learned about openMRS and AMPATH, what they are, and what they stand for. It interesting to learn that OpenMRS is used throughout the world and they help countless individuals who needs medical attention. Moreover,  Learning Angular JavaScript is required to work on these project, therefore our team have been researching and practicing Angular.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

And it’s over: OpenMRS Final Thoughts

This has been an exciting 15 weeks. Already, I feel ready for the real world.

On Monday, we continued work on OpenMRS RAD-235. At this point, we had not hit any roadblocks with completing the issue. Too my other teammates, I felt it seemed like an easy task. They might say otherwise compared to myself.

On our last day of class, Friday, we discussed how our Capstone class would be improved. After a good discussion, all of us were asked to complete the survey. However, once we were done, several members of our team pushed our changes in regards to the error, and as of the time I am writing this blog, we are still waiting on a pull request.

My experience with OpenMRS has been a huge help to my experience in the field of Software Development. Understanding how an open source medical program running on Linux would work intrigued me, despite the many roadblocks we hit in the process. I feel that understanding each computer’s architecture would be beneficial in determining whether the system would be capable of running a virtual machine successfully without issue, particularly one that runs on Vagrant.

Thank you to all the Computer Science professors at Worcester State for providing me the opportunity to keep pursuing my education in this field. I hope with the tools I’ve learned, I can maintain my success in the field wherever I end up.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

OpenMRS: A New Issue

This week couldn’t have gotten any better. We’re already working on another issue, coded RAD-235.

On Monday, we found out that our original issue, RAD-58, was already completed by Ivo, one of the lead developers of the OpenMRS radiology module, but he forgot to mark the issue as such. As a result, Ivo granted us another error that he knows he never worked on.

We made progress on this issue since Wednesday, and there’s still more to be done with one week left. Although one of our group members couldn’t understand how the enum class in Java worked. We’ll see if he can figure it out by next week.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Issue Complete?

This week was very eventful. As far as what we did, I could say we felt accomplished for actually completing an issue in the OpenMRS Radiology module.

On Wednesday, I found out that when we put the working machines on others’ computers, the machines wouldn’t work on PCs other than the original. In what I felt was a good decision, we decided to work off the working machines to help us work on the code.

We didn’t start working on error messages until Friday. All we had to do was change some error messages. The effort was to make it clear for the user that patient records would not be completely saved in OpenMRS, and that the first step for the user was to check their internet connection.

I’m really looking forward to our next issue. But lately, I heard that a specific lead developer of the radiology module forgot to mark our issue as completed. I wonder how we’ll resolve it.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

OpenMRS: We’ve got a working build!

Throughout the week, I’ve been reinstalling Vagrant and the OpenMRS radiology puppet module in an effort to see whether the resulting Virtual machine worked at some point. On Monday, I uninstalled Vagrant and redownloaded the MSI file for the program. On Wednesday, I reinstalled both Vagrant and the puppet module. Shortly afterward, I tried running vagrant up on the puppet module, and 5 minutes later, the VM boot timed out. I reported this to my teammate, Nick, on Friday. What I received shortly after was what seemed like good news: we managed to get a working build of the puppet module on someone else’s laptop.

I’m hoping come Wednesday, I can receive a copy of the working build for my own laptop. I’ve spent countless weeks uninstalling and installing hoping that I can get a working build of the puppet module.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

“Factory Reset your PC”?

Out of many things that could possibly solve my timeout issues with the OpenMRS Radiology virtual machine, one member of my team has been telling me for the past few weeks to “factory reset [my] computer and start from scratch.” As much as this might help me with the issues, I also did not want to give up other important files on my computer that I would need outside this class and outside my career.

This week was no different. Although on Friday, after what felt like the hundredth time trying to get the dcm4chee VM connected, and still unable to find the Vagrantfile where the config.vm.boot_timeout value was stored, I decided I would follow along with my teammates until I found a solution to my problem that doesn’t involve factory resetting my laptop. My only other solution at this point is to reinstall the files for the virtual machine, reinstall Oracle VirtualBox, and reinstall Vagrant. I’m hoping this solution works by Monday.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Wireless Connections and OpenMRS

This week, I continued work on the OpenMRS software, and continued trying to run OpenMRS from the puppet software. I’ve even tried reinstalling all the Git files for the OpenMRS Radiology system, including the puppet files for the dcm4chee servers. Even my teammates never saw the errors I’ve been getting, especially through the Windows command prompt, which is not UNIX-based.

Turns out running the software on a wireless connection makes the virtual box more likely to time out depending on how long vagrant’s timeout value is (I had it set to the default 300 seconds). I am going to try running the software on a wired connection next week. I’m hoping it all goes well.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.